ARTH 500
Clark Visiting Professor Seminar: Race and Visual Culture
Fall 2021
Division I
Cross-listed
This is not the current course catalog
Class Details
Race does not exist. On a biological level, the idea of race as a grounded scientific category has been disqualified for decades. If it had an end, it necessarily had a beginning. One can identify this beginning in the middle ages and follow it through Renaissance as an idea of lineage; the modern intersection of race with skin color began with the early modern colonization process in the Americas and in Africa. From that time forward, the history of race and the history of art intersect. This course will try to show how art history’s tools are fundamental to understanding race as a modern category and social agency. We will focus on the raw materials of the painter (pigments); visuality as a modality of human categorization, the construction of human hierarchies or racial orders, the social efficiency of color theories and racial matrix of caricature. Course readings will privilege the wealth of recent research and historiography addressing the links between art, visual culture and race.
The Class:
Format: seminar
Limit: 16
Expected: 16
Class#: 1721
Grading: no pass/fail option, no fifth course option
Limit: 16
Expected: 16
Class#: 1721
Grading: no pass/fail option, no fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation:
writing assignments, participation
Prerequisites:
none
Enrollment Preferences:
graduate students get preference; places for 8 undergraduate and 8 graduate students assured
Distributions:
Division I
Notes:
This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
ARTH 400 Division I ARTH 500 Division I
ARTH 400 Division I ARTH 500 Division I
Class Grid
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ARTH 500 - 01 (F) SEM CVPS: race and visual culture
ARTH 500 - 01 (F) SEM CVPS: race and visual cultureDivision IAnne LafontR 1:00 pm - 3:50 pm
Clark Art Seminar Room1721
Megamenu Social